0:03  
Awesome. Well, Laura, I can kind of just go ahead. I'm sure most folks have been in either sessions yesterday, perhaps sessions this morning. Or maybe this is your first session. So I'm just going to talk a little bit here. I'm your host for this session. My name is Sam, I will be helping out in the chat, answering some questions. I am the Product Marketing Manager here at Neon CRM. And it's really excited about this session. I'm introducing Laura block, Laura, if you want to wave to everybody. You may have met Laura or worked with Laura before. She actually is our former senior implementation manager, moved over to Neon CRM product owner, Laura and I have worked closely on many product projects, and still continue to work closely. So really excited for today's session. If this is your first session, in the platform, here, you'll see the chat located to your right. Feel free to ask questions throughout that feel free to talk amongst each other. We want to make this interactive in and then if you would just make sure that you're muted. Unless you have questions. I think Laura will likely have some intermittent kind of stops here and there just to ask questions. So just kind of navigate that area, but be cognizant of of your mute button. And yes, Laura, go ahead and take it away. And you can go ahead and introduce yourself.

1:37  
Thanks, Sam. Let me switch to the slide with my photo on it. Yes, so I'm the product owner for Neon CRM. If you're wondering what a product owner does, that's a very fair question. Have you heard from our product manager Anna, during the keynote yesterday, if you made it to that session, Anna works more on what we should add to Neon CRM. Next, what's the most important thing for us to be improving for you all within the product. And then I as product owner work more on tinkering with the nitty gritty details. So what should go where on the page, how it should look how it should feel. So we work together a lot on these new features a little bit more about my experience in Neon CRM, and also just in the nonprofit world in general. Prior to joining me on CRM, I worked at very small, I'd say up to mid size, nonprofit organization. So that's my main experience, I worked as individual giving manager, grant writing was kind of a one person shop for fundraising and marketing at a couple of different organizations. So I'm coming from that perspective. About four years ago, I joined Neon CRM as an implementation consultant, as Sam mentioned. So working with clients like you getting your data into the system and starting to use it for the first time training, setting up going live. And then at the beginning of this year, I moved over to the Product Engineering Department at Neon CRM to work on adding new cool things to the product. I'm going to skip past the house housekeeping pretty quickly because Sam really covered that, I did want to mention that this is going to be a pretty CRM focused session. So most valuable for folks currently using Neon CRM. The first half will be a bit about larger sales strategy for year end, though, before we go into specific CRM demos. So just wanted to mention that in case you aren't a current CRM user, the first half of may be more useful than the second half. But if you are a CRM user, this whole session should be helpful. And I will get into the CRM during the second half. Also wanted to say thanks to Sam. And then I also have Aiden and Christina from the Neon One team helping out in the chat. So thank you guys for helping with answering questions. Yeah, everybody, please post your questions in the chat or the q&a as we go. Thanks. Alright, so the plan for this hour, I do want to talk a bit in the first half, as I mentioned about kind of bigger picture strategy for year end planning. This is really coming from my years of being that one person shop, fundraising and marketing at a couple organizations. And the approach that I found worked well for me to plan year end. It's especially useful if you're new to that type of planning, if you're doing it yourself as a one person or a small team. And then also, if you're newer in your career, like I was when I first started some of this planning. I wanted to touch a little bit on tips and ideas for actually writing the content that you need to develop appeal letters, membership, renewal emails, the specific wording and kind of the writing component of our jobs. And then I will get into the CRM. So I do want to talk for the CRM portion about some general little tips for putting together and delivering your year end plan. And I did want to make a note at the end, I will be getting into a little bit of things that are not in your CRM just yet. So a bit of a preview from the the product development side, we have some new year end templates that are actually going to release into your CRM this Saturday. So we're just a couple days advance notice for this, but I did want to preview those and let you know what you can expect to see in your system starting on Saturday, that should help make your EAD work a little bit easier. Alright, so starting with the year end calendar, again, this is really informed by kind of the approach that I just developed myself over time, a little bit of kind of project management influence. And I do love spreadsheets. So a lot of this will be in kind of spreadsheet or table format, you could definitely do this in a different planning app, like in Asana, or Trello, or just written down. But I tend to go straight to a spreadsheet. So you'll see a few examples like that within the deck. Also, I should mention, again, this deck will be available later. Since I have a lot of templates in there, that might be helpful.

6:08  
All right. So step one, I think in planning is identifying the different segments that you're going to use within your set of constituents that you're contacting. I like to start with the segments instead of starting with kind of the calendar or the you know, the actual plan by date, because I think the segments really inform how you want to plan the rest of your calendar. I'll get more to that later. But just starting with this, I did want to mention also my colleague, Sam grow, Bart is going to be giving a specific session about segmentation later today. So I'm not going to step on that work too much. That's another chance to check this out. But I do just have a couple tips for identifying segments. So a couple of things to think about. You might have an idea of a particular group within your database that you want to target. But it's useful to double check, maybe run a quick report in your system, we'll look at some reports later, to make sure that you have the data that you need to create this segment, for example, you might be thinking, I'd really like to target prospective donors who have never given before, but who have volunteered sometime in the past, you know, kind of those volunteers who might transition to become donors. A good thing to do then is to double check, how many donors or how many volunteers do I actually have who haven't donated? Is it a big enough group to make sense in the time that I have to plan my year end giving program? And then do you have that data in the CRM? Yeah, did your historical volunteer data get get migrated into CRM? Do you have the information that you need in order to pull that segment? Second, I think most importantly, how many segments actually makes sense for you with your time available, the staff you have available. And knowing that each segment that you add, even if it seems like you're going to mostly be able to recycle this similar content, remember that each segment adds extra time to that year in preparation, you'll have to run a separate letter, have that separate set of mailings that you prepare, create a separate email. So really, every segment even if it seems like low hanging fruit does add time to your overall plan. I found when I was first starting out and I was just solo on my own Sorry, I have something in my eye. When I was, you know, a one person shop doing this that my first year I just kept it pretty simple. You know, I think for segments, board members, prospective first time donors, lapsed donors, current donors, you could do something similar for membership renewal, you know, current members, lapsed members, prospective members, three or four. And then I added some complexity over time. So kind of breaking up that prospective donor group into people who've attended one event and might become donors, people who volunteered, who might become donors, other ways to segment them down. So really scaling it to your organization can can help so that you don't become overwhelmed when you hit you know, the end of November and have a zillion segments to work through based on your plan. And the last thing about this, making sure that each segment is exclusive, or if you realize that you might have overlap, you know, a somebody who's in your board member segment will probably overlap with other segments, they also might be a current member. Then make sure that when you list out your segments you also create a priority know if that board member is also in the prospective or is also in the current member segments. You probably want them to get the board member communication instead of the or the current member communication. So just making The list and listing by priority. So you know when you have overlap, where people should go rather than unintentionally sending them multiples of a mailing. So here's the layout that I usually use when I'm planning my segments. You can adapt this depending on how much how much information you need. But typically I'll have you all give my segment a name, I might also give them a nickname because sometimes in your planning and just over those couple of months, where you're working with these groups, you might want to just have like a number or a letter, you know, segment A, if you know what that means, that can make it a little easier for you.

10:38  
But I'll, you know, list out my segments, list a few details. And then the way I'd like to do it before is creating a goal for that segment as a whole. For example, if I'm creating a segment for lapsed donors, you know, they gave previously, but they didn't give and of your last year, so lapsed since 2020, or 2019, I could set a goal for the overall recapture rate that I'd like to have from that segment, I got ambitious here with 25%. But you could set that overall goal. And then I also often like to set a specific goal for each person within that segment, at least on average, within that segment. So my goal is for those lapsed donors, I'd like to recapture 25% of that group. And ideally, I'd like to have them come back to us giving the same amount that they gave prior to lapsing versus maybe the current donors, people who gave last end of year, I want to retain 75% of them, and I want them to increase their gift over last year. I think this can help inform not only your kind of goal setting, but the way you approach writing content for each of these groups when you have an idea of what you want for them as a group, but also what you want for them individually and what you know how you'd like to bring them back into your your donor group or your member group. The last column I typically include is, and this is more of just a brainstorm as you're segmenting, but I like to think about the I usually call them tools, but it could also be communication channels, tools, or channels that are most effective for these groups from from what I've seen before. So knowing that maybe current donors are more likely to have phone numbers for them. And we could potentially call them other groups, you might not have that data available, or you might have found that it's not as effective for that group. So starting to list out your communication channels, I now have a similar example. But for membership. So thinking about if you are running an annual membership renewal campaigns, specifically around end of year, very similar, you can create your different segments, set those two levels of goals of the constituent goal that may depend on your organization's membership setup, I've included some options for upgrading a level or upgrading to a lifetime membership. If that's not your structure, obviously, these specific constituent goal might just be for them to rejoin or for them to join for the first time. So that may be less relevant. But here are some ideas. And again, this deck will be available. So I'm not going to read through every example here. Okay, so we've got our list of segments narrowed down. The next thing I like to do is take that brainstorming idea of your different communication channels, and really consolidated into a into a single list. So I know all of the channels that I need to plan for and think about for end of year. There are some tools that I say are just standard, you'll probably have letters, emails, if you have a regular newsletter already running, consider that if that's going to hit at end of year and then social media. You also might want to take this kind of this planning stage to think about whether you need to use any more specialized tools for your end of yours segments. For example, a dedicated page for giving Tuesday if you'll be running a given Tuesday campaign. If you're you'll be doing any phone calling. If you need to recruit board members to ask major donors or talk to specific donor or member groups. If you'll be doing any peer to peer campaigning, if you need to do texting if you have any events that will hit during end of year. Again, a couple things to think about with this list as you're thinking about it. I think it's useful to really set aside some time to think about and do a little data collection about the tools that you use last year, and how the ROI return on investment was for each of those. Are they really worth re renewing and using again this year, some letters emails, probably yes, but some more specialized ones. If you tried out a new social media channel, or you ran a peer to peer campaign, how did those go? Is it worth continuing them? Do you think you can build on what you did last year? Or do you think that was kind of the limit of what that that tool could do, and you should reconsider whether to use it again. Also, this is another time to narrow down your list of channels based on your capacity. Maybe this is the year to try tic tock, maybe it's not, you know, consider. Consider before experimenting with new channels, if you have the capacity to cover your existing channels, your kind of core standard channels before experimenting with something new.

15:42  
Along the lines of experimenting with something new, though, for tools you're considering using for the first time, before adding them to the plan, make sure you have enough data or enough evidence to really test this tool. The the example that I go to is thinking about starting to make phone calls to members or donors. Double check that you have enough phone numbers for people in your data to make it worthwhile, you know, check how many you have, can you really experiment with this channel effectively with the data you have available? Or should you backup and maybe make a plan for next year to start collecting that data in advance of your end. And finally, make sure that you let the segments that you've identified and the data, this kind of evidence about ROI, and how much capacity you have lead your choice of tools? You might have a board member who's really excited about getting on tick tock this year, but are they right? Are they right about that, you know, make sure that the choices you make with your tools are data lead or segment segment lead. Alright, so we've got our list of segments, our list of tools. And now this is the approach that I like to use for building my actual content calendar for end of year. There's a zillion ways you could put put this together. But the way I do it is kind of a just a chart, but three dimensional, because I add this extra color coding components. So I like to lay it out as a column for each of the segments, a row for each date, through, you know, I'm just using the beginning of December as an example here, but it might be November through December or mid October through December, whatever makes sense for your entire end of your plan. And then the third dimension that I add is this color coding, because I do want to balance my communication to each segment so that not everything is just an ask, we've also got some cultivation built in that could be you know, just information about what their previous gifts are doing for the organization. You know, giving bringing value to them in their membership by sharing valuable information or just communicating with them outside of making a really direct ask. And then you also may want to build in some gratitude for previous giving something like maybe sending a message on Thanksgiving, that is just gratitude for their their support and their involvement, and then being part of your community. And another list of things to consider. So building this calendar, I like to really look at each column. So each segment and think about their specific journey. So making choices not just because it's convenient for you to send the same thing to every segment at the same time, although that's a factor. But really thinking about, you know, from top to bottom, what is their experience going to be with your organization over this whole end of year period. But going back to the idea of making it a little easier for you as much as possible, I still like to consolidate the content pieces that I have to create. So whenever you can have a single content piece across all of your segment columns, that's simplicity for you, in sending out those items, you might customize them for each segment. But that way, you're sending the appeal letter to all segments on the same on the same day, and you can base it on the same content piece. So keeping that kind of minimalism or simplicity in mind at the same time. I mentioned already balancing just general cultivation and education and gratitude content with your specific asks. And then lastly, keep in mind that there might be other things coming out from your organization. You know if there's any events running during that time, if volunteers will be communicating with a volunteer manager. If there's any program related content that's coming out, make sure you coordinate with other teams if if you have a larger organization to see what other communications are coming out so you can plan around them.

19:53  
So here's a sample calendar, just a couple of dates that I've picked out. I've kept it pretty simple, but this is usually what I ended up with. So something like, you know, my my set of segments, and then for each communication piece and each date, you'll indicate which segments should receive something. So for example, here I'm sending a save the date email forgiving Tuesday, but I'm not going to worry about hitting my major gift prospects with giving Tuesday content, I'm going to focus more on them talking directly with a board member and potentially making a larger gift for your end. And then similar for recurring donors, if their current active recurring donors, I do want to let them know about giving Tuesday, they might want to participate, but I'm not going to send them my year end letter. In this case, I'm going to send something different. So that kind of simplifies your content, because each piece will be listed, you can balance their specific journey, making sure you hit the different colors, or however you code those different types of communication. And then you can clearly see what you want to have ready for which date so that you can follow the plan. The last thing that I like to do with this plan is once you have the calendar, it can be helpful to reformat it as just a consolidated kind of to do list for yourself for prepping all of this year end content and all these items. So this is where I might take that one content piece that I've listed there and really break it down into its components. Because this is going to be your checklist for preparing end of year, it could be as detailed as make sure that we have X amount of printer paper and envelopes on hand if you're if you're going to be printing in house, that kind of thing. I like to still include the segment's relevant to each content item, even if it's multiple segments, so that I can quickly reference this list when I'm creating the items. And then do make a note when you plan to customize. I think this is especially relevant for appeal letters and emails where you might send the same general piece to everyone, but you're going to customize it for each group. So this is an example of what this last planning chart could look like. I've simplified it down to just a couple content pieces, so I could fit it on the screen. But this might be a longer list. So for example, if I'm running with the year end letter, my my donation appeal or membership appeal letter, I'll break it down by the different segments. So for example, I need to prep a mailing list for segment one, and a separate mailing list for segment two. And then I'll have different versions of the letter for each. But then all of my segments will have the same return envelopes, you could customize those two, but again, scoping to the size of your project. And then everyone is going to need a donation form and the QR code so they can get to the donation form. And then I want to customize the follow up donation appreciation, email and letter in CRM for them. And I'm going to keep that the same for everyone. Again, that's another place where you could expand your plan and make that even more detailed, or you could keep it keep it simple. So a lot of this segment choice also defines how how much work you're going to have to do. So deciding where you can consolidate and where you really need to customize. Other things that I have here. So it's the name of the content piece, the segments that are relevant, the specific item within that content piece that I need. And then this is completely variable. But the way I like to do it is set myself a due date, to have it ready. Potentially, if you have a review step with other folks at your organization, you might build that into this plan to and then I'll check my status on each item. Alright, so we have a plan, we have the content calendar, and then the specific list of content that you want to prepare, I'm just going to have a quick couple of tips from what I learned learning how to write this content for the first time, new in my career. And then I will get into the CRM. So couple tips on actually the writing portion of our jobs.

24:03  
I think after Experimenting a bit with this over the years, I think that the easiest way to start even though it's kind of the biggest hurdle to get over is start with your biggest communication piece first. That's probably your year end appeal letter or your membership renewal letter. And I'd say letter specifically because typically for email, you might have a shorter version of that same content, the letter is really going to be the big beast of your year end planning. So although it can be hard to get over that hurdle, and write the biggest thing first. That content that you develop, really, you can pull from it to create everything else in your plan. You'll be able to pull out the themes, pull out the specific story that you use, and build all the other pieces from it. So I think it makes sense to start there. For that big piece. Usually the first thing I do is look Go around for that main story that you want to tell. Talk to your program staff, if you are also the program staff think through your own history over the past year. And, you know, find a great story of your organization's impact or the value of your membership program, build the piece around that, and then pull out the specific themes. So even if you don't use your exact core story in every other piece that you send out, you can still keep the themes consistent. And that way, you'll have that kind of unified voice or unified brand for your year end. Also, remember that most people aren't going to read every content piece at all, or even from beginning to end. So it is safer to reuse your main story than we often think it is when we're reading every piece and spending so much time with it. For folks who are just skimming, you telling the same story in the letter and the email and on the donation form. And in the follow up, just provides a through line, it's not as much overkill as it seems to us when we're so deep in it. Also, one tip that I think is helpful when you're building that main communication center piece is remember the entire journey that your constituent will have with that piece. So think about not just what goes on the page, but what's their experience of getting that letter in the mail? What will the envelope look like? What will inspire them to choose to open it? What will be their experience if they do read the letter top to bottom every word versus if they just skim it, which a lot we know a lot of people do? What's it like for them to get out their phone and use the QR code to go to the online form? What's the online membership or donation form? Like? Does that, you know, is that cohesive? Is that part of the story that they're following? What's the experience of completing that form? Have you eliminated any friction? Is it as simple as possible? What's the success or exit page message like and then what's the follow up email like so really, that whole journey is part of that main communication centerpiece even though you know 90% of your attention may be on writing that letter. Keep in mind the whole journey. A couple other suggestions here. As I mentioned, people will skim. So remember to almost test your letter as a skimmer if you will, you know, use bold underline paragraph breaks bullet points, a PS line that draws attention so that when somebody comes in as a skimmer of the letter, they're still getting the core story and they're still getting the main points and they're still getting the appeal to donate or become a member. For fundraising appeals. I think what helps me write that big letter is remembering that I do want to craft a story, beginning, middle and end. And typically, the middle is where your organization and if intervenes in the situation. But with that, keep in mind that you don't want to just talk about we the organization, what we did our accomplishments. Remember to bring in the entire community involved in that story. So include the donors, donors, you played this core role in funding, the intervention that we were able to make in this situation. And then credit your your clients or the community, you serve them, they embraced the intervention, and they are the ones that really made it pay off. Remember to use we language meaning us the community, not we the organization kind of excluding you as the donor.

28:45  
For membership organizations, I still think looking for a story with a beginning, middle and end makes the most sense, kind of your core goal is to illustrate the value proposition of your membership program. You know why this is valuable. But you can tell it either as a story of a member who benefited from your programs and services. Or you can make it a story about the reader. So you the constituent, this is what your experience will be. In that case, you're kind of inventing the end of the story, you're looking forward into the future to create the middle and end of the story. But you're still telling that story. I think using that concept of story can make your letter stand out instead of being kind of a straightforward bullet point list of the benefits that your program offers. Although you may want to include that too. Last thing about writing the content a quick couple tips. Again, this is really what helps me when I was starting to write these appeals for the first time so if this is new, I think I say modeling on formats from successful campaigns. I would never say stealing them. Obviously you don't want to reuse the words themselves. But Getting kind of an idea for how to form those stories or an outline for how you can do it. Borrowing modeling is really useful. I like to look back in my organization's archives to past appeals. Keep a collection, you know, keep a file folder of appeals you receive from other organizations that you might want to use for inspiration. Find examples online. For me, personally, I found the what's in my inbox blog, Pamela grows website, she basically does that she finds examples of Appeals, and she gets a lot of them. And then we'll make a short blog post about really impactful ones that have come through. So that's really another great source to find great things that other organizations have done that you can model on. And I'll be showing this a bit more later, make use of the templates that we'll be giving you inside Neon CRM, to speed up the process and give you some writing ideas. I also like using a writing tool to help with editing my choices Hemingway app, I've got the link here. Keep in mind that using their advice to simplify your writing shouldn't result in kind of taking the brand voice out of it and your personality out of it. That is a danger, I would say with those writing tools. So don't let it make you bland. But it can really be helpful to think about how can I take passive voice out? How can I simplify my sentences, keep them short. Again, keeping in mind that people may be skimming, having a kind of lower grade level to comprehend, the overall writing will help with that skimming. So keeping all of that in mind, those tools can be really great. And lastly, build time into your calendar to have people review what you've created. Again, don't have them just read the letter, although you might have people just doing that too. But make sure you have some process some people who check who tests the process from beginning to end. So including that whole journey that I mentioned in the previous slide, you know, getting the letter using the QR code, filling out the form, filling out a reply envelope, if they're mailing their response back getting the thank you letter or email and get their comments on the whole process. How easy or difficult it was, how it made them feel coming out of it, you know what moment stands out to them, or was there anything that held them back or made it difficult, that kind of feedback is so helpful, and then you can tweak your process to to improve it before you take it live to everyone. All right. So finally, I will get into the CRM now. So we've got our calendar plan. We've built all of our content at this point. And now the next step is to do the setup that you need to do in your CRM to deliver all of these great things that you've created, and then measure your results as they come into. So

32:59  
the last thing I like to do is actually go back to my content plan. And kind of build an even more detailed checklist that is CRM specific. This step is definitely optional. But it can be helpful if you want to end up not just with a checklist of what to send when, but a checklist of what to set up in your CRM when to be ready for it. So I might translate each item needed into the CRM specific need, for example, for segment one for their urines letter, I need a mailing list of just that segment, I'm going to set that up in CRM as a saved report. I need their appeal letter. And in my example, I'm going to print these in house and do all the stamps myself and send them out. So I'm going to set this up as a campaign letter. Rather than sending it out to a mailing house or a printer. I need to prep my return envelopes. So those I am going to get from a printer. But I'm going to review my CRM data to decide on the donation amounts that I want to list on the return envelope details like that. Once you've got that kind of CRM checklist, which is personalized to your your year end plan. Now I'm going to get into the CRM and show a couple things. I'm going to focus on the most common tasks that pretty much everyone will need to do for urine for today. First thing I want to talk about a little bit is a couple tips for creating segments in your system. I especially want to talk about using the right reports for each situation for each type of content that you're delivering. And then a couple of details about those reports. So I'll talk about saved reports in the reports module, and then email audiences in the email module. And then I will get into the preview. So I want to talk about letters, emails, and sending some year end receipts, especially common for fundraising orgs that maybe have recurring donors or other donors who've given a lot over the year. So that will be a little more fundraising focused, but letters and emails, that's membership and fundraising. Again, these templates are going to be a preview, they will be available in your system starting on Saturday. All right, one second while I swap over to a system here, just to let you know, this is one of our internal systems, it's a little IMT. Up there, this is going to be fake all entirely fake data. And the templates I'll show you, again, will be available in your system starting on Saturday. So first, I do want to talk about setting up your saved reports and your email audiences. So really taking that list of segments and turning them into tools that you can use for delivering this content. I'm going to start with reports. So typically, what will be most helpful to you is setting up any lists that will be receiving letters as a saved report. And then lists that will be receiving emails, it's easiest to set them up inside your email audiences section under the emails header. I'll start with letters. So you'll want to go to reports, Newport, and the first thing that you'll hit when you need is, which report do I use? There are two main options, there's going to be a mailing report, and then a household report, they're the first two options here in the left hand column. The main difference here, if you haven't used the Household Report much before is if you send a household report, it will, the system will take anyone who shares a household, you know, they're they're linked into a household inside the system, they share an address, and it will combine them into just one row on your spreadsheet. So you're only sending one copy of the mailing to them. With the mailing report, you'll treat them each as individuals, also companies. And you could potentially send two appeal letters to the same address at the same time. Making the decision I would say, first, double check whether you have households in your system, if you're not using the household feature, no need to worry about the Household Report. The way to double check if you're not sure is go to Accounts, households and see if you have households in your list there.

37:20  
If you do have households, I generally err on the side of using the Household Report for most mailings. The only exception typically, in the way that I've I've done this before is, I'll use the mailing report if I am sending out something that's intended to be used as a tax receipt. So those year end receipts, that is really up to you. If you prefer to send those by household, it is possible to send those specifically by email, we don't have that household grouped receipt just yet for letters. I'll show you how to do that in the emails in a second. But it's it's a tricky one, I think it depends on you knowing your constituent group, I find that it can be tricky to assume that they're filing their taxes jointly. So that's why I tend to choose a mailing report. And they may get two letters that they just combine into their tax filing. But that way, you'll never have to get a request from somebody to please split their receipts later on. But if you know a family typically file their taxes jointly, that could be a reason to still use US household. I'm going to go into the household report, because they went out just a couple other components of this report that are important when you're preparing our segments. Specific specifically from the name of the report, you might think, okay, so I can run this report for my people who are in households, but then I need to run a separate report for people who aren't not quite, you can still do it with just this one household report. The trick is when you get in here, by default will have selected display household records only. That is the report where you're just going to get households. And the purpose of that setting in CRM is so that you can run a report of just households if you need to. But since we're running a mailing switch to the second radio button here, which says Display household records and accounts that do not belong to households. This means you'll still get a list of everyone that qualifies for your report everyone in the segment, but anyone who shares a household will be combined into one row. So you'll still get company accounts and you'll still get individuals that aren't in households. The other thing that's a little bit different with this report is inside the column layouts, unlike any other report in the system, you'll have a bunch of options where there's a forward slash in them. Essentially what's happening here and I think the best example actually is over in the right hand side where we've got household names slash full name, remembering that this report will end up in cluding a bunch of households, and additional individuals who aren't part of household who aren't a part of a household. That's what this this particular column is doing. If you have a household in the row in the results, you're gonna get the household name. If you don't, you're gonna get the full name. So this helps build a mailing list that you can export and use to create your envelopes or your mailing labels, because you'll still get useful information that you can put into the address block or into the salutation line, whether they ended up being a household or an individual on the shelf. There, they're also some over here that are similar, but they're related to people's giving history. So if you're getting a little more fancy, and including details about maybe their their previous years giving, there are options for this too, what you'll get is something like this example right here, current fiscal year households, that's the H H, or individual account donation amount. So again, if you have a household in the row, you'll get that combined giving total for the entire household. If it's an individual or a company in the row, you'll just get their account total. So that's what those additional tokens refer to a couple quick tips. When you're creating your specific segments in reporting, I did want to mention that we talked a little bit earlier about making sure that your segments don't overlap with each other. So you don't have the same person in each segment. Going back to that example of somebody who's a board member and also a current member, you want to make sure that they're in that board member group, and not in that current member or current donor group. What I find really helpful for that is using this exclude option. For example, I'll run with that current member example. Let's say we wanted to get a segment of all members who expired.

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They're going to expire sometime in the future. So they are current as of today. So we'll say membership expiration date is greater than so after. And then I could just pick today's date or if I want to keep this relevant through end of year. And this is really good for working with donation dates, as well as membership expiration dates, I can go with a variable dates, which means it's a date that Neon will keep adjusting automatically over time. So instead of picking from the calendar, I'll go into my custom date choices up here. And I'll say, current day with these dates, you can you'll see you'll have your start month start past X number of days, you know, they expired in the past 30 days, or they donated in the past 30 days, something like that. For this, though, I'll just say they expire sometime after today. So they are a current member as of today. But I know a lot of my board members are members as they should be. But I don't want to include them in this segment. So I'm going to take this group, and then exclude anyone who has the individual type of board member, for example. I don't actually have board member Oh, I do just down at the bottom there. So that's a way to make sure that your groups don't overlap using that exclude group to pull out anyone that you don't want to include. Another common example that we're exclude can get really useful is with recent donors. So if somebody has already donated for this year end season, you may or may not want to ask them to give again, depending on the date range, how much they gave, et cetera. So it can be useful to set up a criteria, for example, maybe I want to get people who gave near the end of last year, but I'm going to skip over adjusting that criteria just for the sake of time. But in the Exclude specifically, what I might want to do is pull out anyone who has donated maybe in the past 30 days, you know that that's soon enough that I don't want to ask them again just yet. I'm just going to include them in my gratitude and cultivation mailings. So you could say, take whatever group is here and exclude anyone who has donated within the past 30 days. And that date will keep adjusting as you approach the end of the year. So NEON will always be looking at the past 30 days from the day you're running the report. So for setting up your reports for letters, the key is really run the report and then save it in your saved reports. You'll be able to either export it if you're sending your letter out, prepared by a printer or mailing house or if You're going to be looking at how to tap to your letter when you create your letter, which we'll get to in just a second. As my page loads, sorry, slow while I'm also running my my conference lead pages. But the next thing I wanted to talk about, sorry, let me just finish that process before I lead on. So saving your report, you'll want to hit you'll want to run your report as I just did, and then hit Save report configuration, give it a name, and then decide if you're just working on this year and work yourself, you could save just in your account, but you may want to save for all of your system users. Once you've saved this, it'll be available in your saved reports folder. And I'll call this segment one just to use my shorthand code here.

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Alright, so the next thing that you might set up is

could use the same words that you're using for your letters for the purposes of emails, but you may want to adjust because you'll likely have some constituents where you have an address for them, but not an email or vice versa. One thing that I forgot to do when configuring this household report is mention some of the other criteria that could be useful to make sure that you are mailing to people who have valid mailing addresses. So let me retrace my steps. And just finish showing that really quickly. So you might want to go back into your report criteria, and add a few extra things. The ones that I usually go to first are, I want to make sure that they have an address. So I might say, address line one is not blank. You also as you might have just seen, we do also have a valid primary address. So if you do keep historical addresses in your system by marking them invalid. Or if you do any national change of address updates in your system, you may want to include this as well. I'll usually say valid primary address is not equal to no meaning it's not marked as invalid. That way, if you use that field, you'll make sure to not accidentally send two mailing addresses that you know, will just be Returned to sender. Other ones that can be helpful are including the deceased criteria. If you do mark any folks as deceased within your system, you obviously don't want to mail them then later. So we'll say deceased is no they're not marked as deceased. And the other one that is similar is the Do not contact PFLAG if you mark folks as not to be included in mailings, you want to make sure to exclude them from this list. Do not contact is a little tricky, because it can be a double negative in the way that it reads. So if do not contact is equal to yes, in the system. That means yes, they should not be contacted. So for the purposes of this report, you want to say no, do not contact equals no, no, it is okay to contact them, if that makes sense. So those are a couple others that you might want to include. And because we have this address line, that's why I tend to like to build my segments, as both an address kind of a mailing report and then as an email report, because you will have folks that have no address, but you can email them that kind of thing. So to build your email lists, you want to go into emails, email audiences. Keep in mind, if you're using the MailChimp integration, this is still the method you'll just at the end of the process, you'll send that list over to MailChimp. If you're using the Constant Contact integration, though, that is a bit different, you'll want to build your lists inside the constant contact module. So for that, that portion, your process will be slightly different, but the reports you run will be exactly the same. For each segment, go ahead and create that email audience. I'm going to keep using my shorthand of segment one, you can have a more detailed description, and then you probably want to keep all of these audiences unpublished or not public. The difference when we actually run the report will be that we're looking for folks with email addresses rather than with mailing addresses. Otherwise, you'll still want to keep that criteria for whether they're marked as Do not contact or deceased. There's an additional option for if they've opted out of email, though so that's the other one that I would say changes between your your mailing lists and your email lists. Once you've created your email audience with the name of your segments here, to add your list, go down to audience sources and then add and we're going to want to attach this to a live report. Live report means that the on will keep reading freshing this report will refresh each night overnight. So every day you'll have an update, you can also request a refresh by hitting the little circle button at the top. So if you just want to see the updated list, and most importantly, Neon will refresh the list right before sending an email to that list. The reason this is really helpful is because as as you're asking people to make their donation for end of year or to renew their membership for end of year, you want to pull them out of that list, once they've done the action that you're asking them to do. By setting these up as live reports, Neon will automatically pull them out of the list as they take the action. You can build these from your saved reports. So if you just wanted to reuse that mailing report that we saved earlier, but I want to create it a little bit differently, because I don't care if they have a mailing address or not. So I'll build this as an email audience report instead.

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And when you can filled in automatically or surely not going to have to add criteria for deceased or do not contact, it'll just be there. But we will still want to add the criteria for the segment itself. So including or excluding the people that you want to have in that group. Oh, Donna, I just saw your question. If they say do not contact, you shouldn't typically you would not still want to send them stuff. Sorry for this. Yeah, this is a little bit tricky. So do not contact if it's equal to yes. So if I switch this to equal to yes, that means yes, they are marked as Do not contact in your system. So you would not want to send an item to them. So what you actually want is for Do not contact to be No, if that makes sense. So it is a bit of a double negative, but essentially do not contact yes means yes, they should not be contacted, do not contact No means no, it's okay to contact them. So in this case, I'm going to say I don't want it to be equal to yes, and that'll be the the criteria that are already built in with this email report when you open it. So you'll notice that the one other thing that's not actually listed down here, but it's just built in inherently to the report is that email address has to be populated, they have to have an email address to be added to an email report. So that's the fourth one that's already built in, that's not listed here. So these should all be relevant and useful to keep, the only change you want to make then is adding the specific criteria for the segment that you're targeting. So if I'm looking at that list of current members again, or maybe this will just be for the sake of time, just my board member group, I'll say all of those things, but then their individual type should be board member.

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Once you run the reports, there's

53:05  
just one extra click to connect it back to your email audience. And that's what powers that automated, automated updating of the report over time. So now that I've set up this report, and as soon as I click save email list to save this report and attach it to the email audience, if I go into Neon, two days from now and add my newest board member to the list by tagging them as a board member in the individual type field, this email audience will update automatically on its own and add that new person to it. Alright, we've just got a couple minutes left. So I'm going to jump ahead and show you these templates that we're going to be adding to your system. This Saturday. We're adding we have a total of six new templates that should be helpful but it will vary depending on the modules that your organization has. So just to quickly tell you about that. If you have the fundraising module turned on in your system, you're going to get a sample donation appeal so your end fundraising appeal in both letter and email format. And we also have a year end summary receipt letter for donors in again both letter and email format. If you have the membership module, we're going to add a year end membership appeal as an email and letter. If you have both fundraising and membership modules, you will get all of it. The places that you'll see these show up once they're released to your system on Saturday will be under letters in the campaign letters

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list.

So with these you'll see a couple of new show up that are titled templates or template is in the name. If you end up not needing to use these they're simple to delete from the list but we will just be adding them to your system on Saturday. I've got them listed right at the top But this template header should give them away. For all of these, we're dropping in the pre built content. But the intent is that you can definitely edit and customize these. So going back to Toki, actually writing the content and building it, we do have some advice in here, we have some suggested tools to help build the content. But you could wipe all of that out and just use our formatting as well. So for each of the letters, you'll want to click in, and you'll see a little preview of the letter, but to actually get in and tinker with it, click the Edit button at the top right. And that'll open up the full editing screen. The way we've built it, it's just giving you the default background template. So that's kind of the plain template that just has your logo at the top. If you want to change that, you will be able to select a different template to attach to it. I don't think I'll have time to get into templates in detail. But there are some good support guides for it. The key is you'll want to go into global settings, and adjust your letter templates. That includes the ability to not have any on printed template at all, but instead just set the margins. So if you are printing on pre printed letterhead that you have on hand, that's the way to go go create a template that is just giving your margin sizes. And we'll we'll back away from printing any extra logo or color content in the header or footer. For the content, the body content of the letter itself, though, this is what our templates will look like here. So we've built in some automated content that should be helpful with, you know, a address block, and then a salutation line. And then getting into the real meat of the letter, I'm going to expand my window here a bit. All of these sections that are in bold with a parenthesis before and after, and italicize. Those are all just advice about potential building blocks for the content, you can use those as inspiration, or you can wipe them out and plug in your own your own content here. And so a lot of these because it should be so customized, we're really, yeah, getting into the detail with a lot of items that you could customize yourself. But some suggested content like, Hey, here's where you could add an impactful PST statement. And here's where you want your signature line to be. We've also added some kind of general stock photography, feel free to replace that, of course, to replace the photos in here, you'll want to either double click on the image or you can select it and then hit the little photo button again, to open the the photo editing window. Here you can resize or you can just replace with your own images or your own stock photography that you're using instead. So the letters, all three of the letters will be similar to that, again, we've got donation, appeal, membership appeal and your receipt. And then the other items will be in the email dean's list. And there will be a support guy to go with this to really walk you through where to find these items. But hopefully there'll be useful tools to make your ends a little bit easier. Kristin asking about the size of the photo, that's a great point. Part of the reason that we put in those stock photos, even though probably folks will usually replace them is because they do come with a size built in that we know works. So mimicking the size of the existing image could be helpful. But I will make a note to put that in the support guide as well, that definitely makes sense. For the emails, they're really similar, but we've built them with slightly shorter content, so they're not quite as demand doing on the eyes. You know, people tend to scan shorter content in emails. So you'll see a very similar setup, but just more concise and more simplified. We've also got this year end to receipt template, which has our actual built in audited year end receipt available.

So if this will load up, I did just want to quickly show what this tool looks like. You can add this to any of your emails, but we did build it into this template in particular to keep it really simple. So you'll still want to come in replace your logo, replace the image if you'd like to. And then you can tinker with the settings for this donation summary receipt I've included just about everything by default just to show what's possible. But the key with this session is hover over it and then go into the little gear button and you'll be able to customize exactly what it's showing. So if you want to exclude gifts to a certain campaign, maybe you want to recognize those separately or just not include them in the receipt. You want to include or exclude in kind gift information. And I will wrap up after this but I did promise earlier dimension where you could Send a consolidated receipt for a household. This is the spot. So if you're in these settings, turn on the household option. And that way you can send the full household receipt via email. Keep it turned off if you just want to send it for an individual. So that's just a quick preview of the templates that we'll be adding to your system on Saturday. Again, you can remove them if you don't need them. But if you would like to use them, get in there tinker around, we have some advice about how to build the content, and we will have a related support guide for it. Thank you so much. Apologies for running a couple minutes over. Thank you all. That is everything for today but the recording and the deck will be available later for further planning and any other questions and I will wrap up for today. I think we hit all the quest

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